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19/01/2015

Travod and how to win your client's trust...

Some readers of my blacklist have suggested that companies should be categorised better rather than be simply listed alphabetically. My criteria for now is just who I would not work for and why. They suggest I should classify them by country, and separate bad payers, from non-payers and low payers. This
sounds like a great idea and I have studied that possibility but found
it is not very practical to start such categories, because some people
belong to all of them and there would be repeats.

On top of that, their strategy to gain trust from clients is to pretend they are an international company based everywhere. There
is nothing illegal about that, and they are not the only ones to do it,
but it's definitely very embarrassing for them. And they go through a
lot of efforts to hide the following information. Here is the story:I mentioned in the blacklist a report from a French translator arguing that their French address was a church and that they did not even belong to the registry of the Chamber of Commerce in Paris:

"I made a translation for Travod. It took 12 days before I received an
answer to my many reminders asking if the translation was fine and for a
PO# so that I could invoice them.
They replied that all needed info is published on their website www.travod.com
Checking the website it says that they have offices in Paris at 44
boulevard des batignolles. After checking at this adress there is only a
church!
Moreover, I checked the French chamber of commerce and there no company called Travod registered in France.
So beware, personally I will never work with them again and I should feel lucky if I ever get paid for my translation"

Shortly after the publication of this info in my list, Travod removed the "Paris office" from their website and sent me 2 mails, arguing that none of this was true and that they should not be part of my blacklist.

Here is our exchange:

Email received from Anny, pm@travod.com 22/11/2013

"Hello,
We would like to ask you to remove us from your blacklist of translation
company.
The information given there is false and disrespectful!
We request it to be removed immediately!
TRAVOD Team

Email received a minute later:

In order for you to see that you post false information:
1) you can check our website, we don't pretend we have an office in
Paris, http://travod.com/contactus/ (Well, not anymore anyway, oh those lying freelancers)2) Yes, we do have an office an operational office in Moldova which
helps to reduce costs, but we NEVER hide that. (Why not say it's their main office, what's wrong with that?)3) We have registered offices in UK and US.
4) FYI, you may check some more references:
http://worldblu.com/awardee-profiles/2013.php#travodhttp://www.atanet.org/onlinedirectories/tsd_corp_listings/tsd_corp_view.pl?id=1032 (Irrelevant employee recommendation and a ranking in some obscure business list)

So please remove our name from your list!

TRAVOD Team"

My reply:

"Just like we don't add people without evidence, we don't remove them without evidence.

Please
forward the evidence from chambers of commerce that you have offices in
the UK and NY and we'll take off that information.

Kind regards,

translationethics"

In
the meantime, I checked all this myself before they modify their page
again, intrigued by this new comment on LinkedIn, from another freelance
translator:

"I just wanted to confirm that Travod seems to be pretending to operate
in the US while actually being in Moldova. I live in New York City where
their offices are and thought I would drop by their office at 244 5th
Av., which is supposed to be their HQ (according to their contact page).
I have photos showing that no such office exists there. 244 5th Av. is
the location of a company that sells virtual offices (nymail.com), which
is basically a mailbox and forwarding service. It seems that many
fraudulent/scam companies work out of this address. I called the office to
ask about this and the person on the line told me that she was in the
office right now, which was highly unlikely. I did contact proz.com about
this and they told me that they would look into it, but it doesn't seem
to have changed anything. To be fair, my experience with the company has
not all been bad(...)" Read rest of thread

Now,
even without saying the above is true, one has to admit it is very
believable given the previous comments in the thread. There seems to be
some pattern emerging here.

So what Travod really does is rent virtual offices in major cities for about 20 dollars a month. Whether
or not they have actual offices in these places does not really matter
anyway to me, they are still staying on my list on the sole grounds of
the rates they offer.

But
the question of where these companies are truly based remains
interesting because it's about deforming the truth playing on words and
constructing a business facade. And that deserves to be known more widely.

Here are the facts now to backup those mean allegations. Travod's
homepage will leave you under the impression that it is situated in the
USA, New York more precisely. Skyscrapers, yellow cabs, ATA (America
translator's association) logo in a privileged spot, as well as a little boy playing with a dog on a beach (?) to give its viewers a cheap heart-warming feeling.

In the contact page, their first address is NY, their last one, segregated by a blank, is Moldova.

As
it turns out, they don't seem to directly employ anyone in NY, Hong Kong or
London. They pay, along with other companies, for a virtual office and mail
service, some private company to take care (pass on to them that is) of
anything landing there. Actually they probably never physically engaged
in any sort of activity in those places. And that is the beauty of these so-called "virtual offices".Never
heard of them? Me neither until yesterday. I just think it's brilliant.
Borderline unethical, quite embarrassing, but allowed, definitely not illegal. And there is a need for it.

Now
here is some information which confirms that these translators are
right. Here is what comes up when checking the addresses for New York,
followed, if
you still have doubts, by pic of the door with names of the companies
located at this address, proving that Travod isn't one of them:

... and London:

BTW
I love this sales pitch, it's just brilliant: "The advantage of this is
that your clients and suppliers are given the impression that you have a
professionally run organisation." ...Because let's face it, if you need us, you must be a bit of a joke. Brits are so witty :)

... and finally Hong Kong:

As for Paris, it has disappeared from Travod's new homepage. But their old contact page (that they did not remove properly) and Translator's Café profile, the yellow pages, and Proz page all confirm that they were lying in the email they sent me- and here it is again:

"In order for you to see that you post false information:
1) you can check our website, we don't pretend we have an office in
Paris, http://travod.com/contactus/"

So
the only office left is therefore Moldova, their only non-virtual
office. Something tells me that's where they truly dwell, so I did not
bother checking. There are limits to my awful, disrespectful nosiness
:)

But
in any case, what is wrong with Moldova? This seems like a nice enough
country. Ok they don't have yellow cabs and skyscrapers but they do have
children-dogs friendships, and that is the main thing, innit?

4 comments:

Thank you for exposing these jokers! They sent me sent me work requests for penurious rates -- rates that no professional in the developed world could possible live off -- until the 3rd time I told them to take a hike.

Thank you for exposing these jokers! They sent me sent me work requests for penurious rates -- rates that no professional in the developed world could possible live off -- until the 3rd time I told them to take a hike.

Wow! What a bunch of scammers.. Amazing they didn't get caught and still 'operate'. If you're independent translator or freelance interpreter - you don't have to pretend you're so international and big and have offices all over, just be honest and do good job and customers will come to you!

After carrying out some basic due diligence on Travod the first time I received one of their offers through Proz.com, I set a filter in my email client to divert all such future incoming messages to my junk folder, where they belong. I recommend others do the same.